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If the Left Had a Tea Party…

In New Jersey, the party’s Working Families Alliance helped convince Jersey City and Newark to pass paid sick days mandates. The alliance also played a pivotal role helping Ras Baraka defeat a Wall Street financed candidate in Newark’s most recent mayoral election.

And here in the Big Apple in 2013, the WFP’s endorsed candidates won races for mayor, city comptroller, public advocate, city council speaker and most contested city council races. In all, WFP-endorsed candidates now comprise more than half of the city council. Nearly all of them emphasized platforms promising to combat inequality in a city where almost half of the population lives at or near the poverty line.

“Many progressives wouldn’t be in office without the Working Families Party,” says Jumaane DWilliams, a 37-year-old city council member from Flatbush who is wearing an Occupy Wall Street pin at today’s minimum wage rally.

If the WFP’s wins were isolated incidents, perhaps they could be ignored. But as Congress remains gridlocked and as liberal frustration with Obama’s cautious centrism mounts, similar progressive upheavals have been occurring throughout the country.

In Massachusetts, progressives cleared a potentially crowded Democratic primary field and elected liberal hero Elizabeth Warren to the U.S. Senate. In Seattle, Kshama Sawant unseated a Democrat to become the city’s first socialist city councilor in decades. In Lorraine County, Ohio, a slate of Independent Labor Party candidates swept Democrats out of power during local elections. In Chicago, the teachers union mounted primarycampaigns against state lawmakers who voted to slash public employee pensions, and now the same union is leading an independent political organization that may mount an election challenge to incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015. And in Vermont, socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is considering a presidential run in 2016, promising to try to push the Democratic Party to the left.

With the WFP being the most consistently successful of all these uprisings, liberalmagazines have been gushing over the party’s potential to be a game-changer all over the country. Thanks to that national hype, Cantor is a mini-celebrity in New York politics. In this particular event’s sea of mostly young African American and Latino activists, he has been shaking hands, pressing his message with reporters and taking friendly flack from organizers about all the attention he’s received.

“Did Dan tell you he put this whole thing together himself?” asks activist Jonathan Westin as we first arrive. Cantor laughs, and then turns to the fast-food protest’s lead organizer, Camille Rivera, and says, “You look tired. You’ve been up all night getting ready for this, right?”

That 24-7 ethos is a prerequisite for Cantor’s scrappy third party—and it is one he lives by.

“People wonder about the Wizard of Oz and what’s happening behind the curtain in New York politics,” said Emmanuel Caicdeo during a staff party the night before the fast-food rally. “The answer is: It is Cantor working it.”

The line generated a chuckle from the WFP’s young staff, and Cantor immediately responded by saying, “That’s ridiculous.” His reputation, however, is no laughing matter now that WFP is winning elections. Success has brought more critical scrutiny of the WFP than ever, as evidenced by the Fox News reporter now pressing him to admit that the sign-wielding activists outside Wendy’s are not actually fast-food employees.

“It’s Fox News and so you are typically wrong,” Cantor says to the correspondent, throwing rhetorical red meat to the protestors elbowing in to watch the exchange. “Now, I’m sure this part won’t get on your show, but it is always the case that when workers struggle they try to organize community support. So we see the community’s involvement as a great thing, not something to hide.”

It is the kind of zinger he has clearly used before, whether 30 years ago when he was a young fast-food union organizer, or today as the middle-aged head of the WFP. But it is also more than a sound bite. For all the liberal paeans to solidarity, creating a unified multiracial coalition around progressive economic causes—and also generating broader “community involvement” in politics—is the most challenging part of Cantor’s job.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, shown in this 1999 photo with his family and Bill and Hillary Clinton, was an early supporter o the Working Families Party. | AP Images

It is about to get even more difficult as this iconoclast now tries to grow his party into a 50-state operation.

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There is a redundancy to the modern left’s quest for an analogue to the conservative movement’s political machine. Every election cycle, PowerPoint-wielding gurus are touted as liberalism's messiahs, and then they and the front groups they create, with names like Priorities USA and America Votes, often vanish after the campaign. Meanwhile, with union membership declining and community organizing groups chronically strapped for cash, the left’s political infrastructure and connective tissue weakens.

Cantor, because of his recent success, is the guru du jour. His third-party model aims to reverse the trend by expanding the WFP into more locales and by making the party a household name.

“When Gallup surveys voters, they ask ‘Are you a Tea Party Republican,’” he says as we walk back to the WFP’s office after the fast-food rally. “We want Gallup to ask ‘Are you a Working Families Democrat?’ and we want voters know what they are referring to.”

Last Saturday, progressive Democrats won a battle in New York. But whether we will win the war is more of an open question.

The short-term win was Gov. Andrew Cuomo agreeing to a suite of progressive reforms in response to my candidacy against him for the Working Families Party nomination for governor this year. On some issues, like freeing municipalities to raise their own minimum wage beyond the dictates of Albany, the governor made a notable switch in position. On others, like passing a DREAM Act that will extend state financial aid for higher education to undocumented students and pushing for public financing of elections, the governor re-committed to positions he previously failed to fight for.

I was proud to work with the Working Families Party, to show progressives in New York and across the country a blueprint for exerting leverage in primaries. I do not, however, believe that the governor’s commitment to a progressive vision is real enough or substantial enough to deny the people of New York a vigorous debate this year.

I’m still considering mounting a challenge against Governor Cuomo in the Democratic primary. Time is tight, and the odds are against me. But if I can put the resources together quickly, this could be a powerful opportunity to change the debate in this state and the country.

Why? Because a contest between corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats is not good enough. The public still deserves to hear what a truly progressive, populist vision of our economy and our democracy looks like.

My vision for New York is different from the governor’s. I believe we can live in a state where wages are rising, small businesses are thriving and our schools are the best in the country. We can have an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy and well connected. Our society can work for the upstart small businesswomen with big ideas, the young couple (gay or straight) trying to get a loan for their first home and the retail workers struggling to achieve the American dream.

New York’s economy is dominated by mega corporations that are the result of mergers on top of mergers, and banks that are so big they are destined to fail. We’ve come to accept this state of affairs as the natural order, and we don’t question it. But if we are going to reinvigorate our economy and democracy, we must challenge it and we must change it.

As governor, I would change the rules and un-rig the system. People know the deck is stacked against them: Just ask the rising tech entrepreneurs who are cut out of the market by Internet giants, or the publishing companies discriminated against by Amazon. Ask the workers who want nothing more than $15 an hour and a voice.

On day one, I’d take steps to stop the Comcast merger dead in its tracks, a deal designed to stifle competition and raise your cable bills yet again. At every turn, at every opportunity, I would find ways to break up economic cartels and force real competition where small businesses could get in the game in every corner of our economy—from finance to publishing, retail to manufacturing. And for those who say manufacturing can’t come back, I say their imagination has failed them. We can make manufacturing a bedrock of New York’s economy if we stand up to those who have economic interests different from the working families of our state.

Power doesn’t cede power without a fight, but it is a fight I am ready to have if I can gather the resources. Whether in this election cycle or not, politicians like Governor Cuomo need to see a groundswell of support for a bold, progressive, populist new politics. The more we confront them with this vision, the even greater the demand for the vision will be.

Zephyr Teachout is associate professor at Fordham Law School.

With the WFP’s state parties and national organization together operating on only an $8.5 million annual budget, it is a lofty goal. After all, a single candidate, Cuomo, has alone raised more than $33 million, and the Koch brothers’ political network has amassed more than $400 million for its operations. But unlike those who preceded him, Cantor offers the left one thing the average campaign consultant does not: He has for years been battle testing his theories about challenging the so-called 1 percent in the shadows of Wall Street. And he doesn’t buy the argument that such inequality must remain an unchallenged fact of life.

“We believe America is healthier when there is a powerful left,” he says as we trudge up a cold stairwell to the WFP’s Brooklyn headquarters after the fast food rally. “When we had a strong left, we got stuff like higher wages and a social safety net. Without a strong left, we have gotten rampant inequality. Everybody knows this, but we are the party that is willing to do something about it.”

Cantor was supposed to be taking this message all over America at the beginning of the Clinton era, not toward the end of the Obama presidency. Back then, pro-business Democrats had vanquished the party’s New Deal liberals, championing Wall Street deregulation, welfare cuts and jeremiads against “the era of Big Government.” It worked well for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, even as many progressives feared those policies were sowing disaster.

For Cantor, the only future seemed to be outside the Democratic Party. He wasn’t, however, interested in the traditional third-party formula of putting up a doomed presidential candidate and then hoping that becomes a national political apparatus. (See Nader, Ralph.)

David Sirota is staff writer for PandoDaily, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and the author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising and Back to Our Future.